One month 'til Halloween

There are many colonial buildings along Germantown Pike from Philadlephia past Collegeville. The Blackhorse Inn in Flourtown is one of them, and a group is currently restoring the building to use as offices and a home for the Springfield Historical Society. The building was scheduled for demolition after it was sold in 1990 until the current restoration project began.


As you can see the rennovations are well underway, though far from complete. These people were gathered for a Heritage Day celebration at the inn Sunday afternoon.


One of the highlights was a performance by Carolinn Skyler, playing the Glass Armonica. This instrument was one of the many things Benjamin Franklin invented.



Here she is playing some Gershwin. For more info on the glass armonica, check out this web page at the Franklin Institute. Carolinn also has a web site, though it appears non-functional right now.

I've been to two games at Yankee Stadium in my life. The first, my first major league game ever, was the Mayor's Trophy game (Yankees vs. Mets) sometime in the early 70's.
The second game is the one you see in these photos, game 6 of the World Series in 1977.
This is the game where Reggie Jackson hit three home runs, leading the Yankees to victory and the world championship over the Dodgers.
Despite the presence of dozens of mounted police officers posted at the edge of the field, fans dropped from the stands at the end of the game and swarmed the field, grabbing anything they could from bases to clumps of grass to take as souvenirs.

I remember standing on the subway platform after the game with my father, having a conversation with a guy holding two clumps of grass, dirt dropping from his hands. He was very happy.

These photos were taken with my Argus C-III, probably loaded with Tri-x film. Somewhere I have more photos of this game, and if I ever find them I'll scan some more.

The Evans-Mumbower Mill in Upper Gwynedd held an open house Sunday afternoon. The mill, along the Wissahickon Creek on Swedesford Road, closed in 1929. The exterior of the mill was restored, and volunteers are busy slowly restoring the inner workings of the mill, including the giant wooden water wheel. The work is not yet complete, but much of the four-story machinery is in place. The mill should be operational sometime next year, ready for demonstrations of early industrial power.

One of the artifacts dug from the grounds around the mill.

Sometimes a digital camera just can't capture a low-light scene the way you see it. Sensor chips don't have the latitude to capture the wide range of light that you can see with your eye.
Once in a while, however, the camera can get it just right. This scene, caught early this morning, looked the same in the camera as it did in person. I didn't have to do anything to this image beyond some cropping. The moon had that salmon color, and it really looked that big. The sky was exactly that shade of blue.
Good way to start a day.

The last two weeks of August are usually bucolic, with everyone away on vacation, or at band camp, or otherwise occupied. Labor Day is an odd holiday, with most people opting out of community events (with a few exceptions - Celebracji!) and instead retreating to backyard BBQ's and the like.
Then September hits. School starts, and it seems like a two-week backlog of things to do suddenly appears.
Of course, in our case the big news is that school DIDN'T start in one district. We saw the storm clouds gathering all summer, with both sides in Souderton getting ready for what seemed, and probably was inevitable.

Here I am working at the pre-Labor Day SASD meeting...I wore a blue shirt to maintain impartiality. Well, OK, that's just what I wore that day.

The past two weeks have seen record hits to our web site, hundreds of comments from all sides on the strike stories, and some criticism of a certain photo that ran on our editorial page last week.
One of my duties is to moderate the comments that are posted on our web site, and this has been pretty much a constant 24/7 endeavour all week. The danger with an open forum is, of course, that it turns into a high-tech game of dodge ball name-calling and sniping. I am impressed that for the most part, this has not been the case. And some commenters have even taken on the role of moderators themselves, taking other commenters to task when they felt the posts were unjustified.
You may wonder what comments don't make it to the web site.
Well, almost all of them ARE there. The only exceptions, and there have been less than five of these, are off-topic personal attacks, posts with personal information on them, or posts with lewd or profane language. If a commenter claims a fact in our stories is incorrect, I immediately check on that and post a correction if needed.
Otherwise, you are reading the posts as they were submitted. We do not edit posts; we only accept or reject them.
Today we posted the teacher and administrator salaries on the web site and in the paper. We got two or three negative comments, and one positive comment (from a teacher!) so far. This information is public record, and is posted on other web sites; we figured that since some of the important issues in this strike directly relate to what the teachers at the bottom and top of the pay scale are making and how many of them there are, that this information is relevant and useful to our readers.
One caller criticized the timing of our publication of these numbers, right before an important school board meeting.
Well, that's exactly the point. Give all sides as much information as possible so they can make informed decisions and perhaps speak their minds at this meeting.

On a brighter note, North Penn High School students were treated to a visit from John Oates Monday, probably their most famous alumni. Oates still has family in this area, so he is no stranger to North Wales even though he lives on a farm in Colorado now raising emus and alpacas.
Oates looked a good 10 years younger than his age. I guess 35 years of writing and performing top-ten hits can do that.

Here, I am wrecking another one of Mark Psoras' photos by standing in the middle trying to look busy.

Oates gave a terrific talk to the kids, and took time to answer questions from the many media outlets that showed up for the event. I'm still humming his songs...man, they're catchy.